In cloud-based content and collaboration services such as, for example, Microsoft® SharePoint® Online (SPO) services, SharePoint® server farms are deployed with certificates that enable the service to access other back-end (or external) services such as, for example, Microsoft® Azure®, Microsoft® Exchange®, Fast Search & Transfer ASA (FAST)™ Search, Microsoft® Office®, etc. The SPO services support dedicated tenants via a dedicated service and non-dedicated tenants via a general service. With the dedicated service, a single enterprise may exist in a dedicated environment with its own unique set of certificates for accessing the back-end services. Among other limitations, the dedicated environment requires dedicated certificates, hardware, and networking equipment.
Unfortunately, these dedicated environments can be extremely burdensome to manage and scale. For example, each dedicated environment needs to manage as many as hundreds of certificates for each dedicated tenant. Additionally, the dedicated environments can require dedicated front-end access servers and dedicated content farms that are functionally and physically separated (or isolated) from other dedicated and non-dedicated tenants in a server farm.
Overall, the examples herein of some prior or related systems and their associated limitations are intended to be illustrative and not exclusive. Upon reading the following, other limitations of existing or prior systems will become apparent to those of skill in the art.